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AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

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Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#61

Post by dgellow »

jfengel wrote: post #56
dgellow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, that's horrible. But the hot question is: is Amazon the entity who should decide to shut it down? I would personally prefer to have that decision be taken by a governmental agency or anything else managed by an elected person. Now, I'm not a US citizen, and I have zero trust in the current US administration, but in a "normal" context I would want to have at least some governmental overview of the shutdown p…

Here's another hot question: if it were your computer, would you like a government agency telling you if you should leave it up or take it down?

Not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#62

Post by jfengel »

dgellow wrote: post #61
jfengel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another hot question: if it were your computer, would you like a government agency telling you if you should leave it up or take it down?

Not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.

The content is hosted on a computer owned by a corporation, not the government. Many people interpret this as their decision to make, rather than the government's. If you don't believe so, you'll have to describe the ways in which their rights to their computers differ from yours.

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#63

Post by JamesBarney »

dgellow wrote: post #41
stickfigure wrote: post #30

It's worth pointing out the offensive content cited in the document: * “Fry’em up. The whole fkn crew. #pelosi #aoc #thesquad #soros #gates #chuckschumer #hrc #obama #adamschiff #blm #antifa we are coming for you and you will know it.” * “#JackDorsey ... you will die a bloody death alongside Mark Suckerturd [Zuckerberg].... It has been decided and plans are being put in place. Remember the photographs inside your hom…

For sure, that's horrible. But the hot question is: is Amazon the entity who should decide to shut it down? I would personally prefer to have that decision be taken by a governmental agency or anything else managed by an elected person. Now, I'm not a US citizen, and I have zero trust in the current US administration, but in a "normal" context I would want to have at least some governmental overview of the shutdown p…

I think Amazon the entity is exactly the right person to decide who their customers are and what their contractual obligations are to those customers.

If I ran a SaaS I definitely wouldn't want to submit a form to some government entity and wait 3 months for some bureaucrat to decide whether or not I can stop serving a customer that I am contractually allowed to stop serving.

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#64

Post by LatteLazy »

orwin wrote: post #43
LatteLazy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what did the NBA and NHL do?

They support racial equity, a lot of NBA and NFL player (don't know about NHL) supported their communities during Covid + BLM and paid bail/lawyer money in some states so people get their right to vote back. NBA stars were particularly active during the first lockdown.

Thank, I guess I missed that (aside from Kaepernick)

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#65

Post by dgellow »

JamesBarney wrote: post #63
dgellow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, that's horrible. But the hot question is: is Amazon the entity who should decide to shut it down? I would personally prefer to have that decision be taken by a governmental agency or anything else managed by an elected person. Now, I'm not a US citizen, and I have zero trust in the current US administration, but in a "normal" context I would want to have at least some governmental overview of the shutdown p…

I think Amazon the entity is exactly the right person to decide who their customers are and what their contractual obligations are to those customers. If I ran a SaaS I definitely wouldn't want to submit a form to some government entity and wait 3 months for some bureaucrat to decide whether or not I can stop serving a customer that I am contractually allowed to stop serving.

I get your point, and understand your position. For my SaaS I also wouldn't want to deal with something like Parler. That being said, I don't personally believe that your analogy of your (or my own) SaaS platform is that relevant. The difference here is that Amazon could be considered a major infrastructure provider. It has around 30% of the cloud market share, which puts it in a very powerful category if they have the power to shutdown platforms. I personally do not feel comfortable giving that much power to a corporate entity without some level of overview by citizens (aka the government).

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#66

Post by vel0city »

gfodor wrote: post #50
JamesBarney wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The aggregate situation of de-platforming of individuals and entire platforms from the Internet by a few unilateral decisions by corporations reveals a power structure we ought to not want (it has always been there, but now it's undeniably shown itself willing and able to exercise its power when needed) since it will inevitably be abused given incentives and the lack of checks and balances on it. When it's more t…

I'll admit the use of 'unilateral' here is probably poor, I don't know the proper one. These companies exert monopoly power in the markets they are in. Decisions made by companies which are monopolies are "unilateral-ist" because once a small number of them make a decision together (perhaps colluding) then it leaves no recourse for the person or group they are deciding against. Mentioned elsewhere, the process we sho…

AWS has somewhere around 30% marketshare in a market with well more than dozens of players. I have a hard time seeing it as a monopoly.

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#68

Post by arenaninja »

finikytou wrote: post #37
arenaninja wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a hashtag about a video of the DC rioters chanting it. Context matters, and in this context it wasn't hypocritical at all Source: not on twitter but am familiar with the video

I dont understand your point... Couldn't people watch this video and think that they were right? Hence twitter was doing exactly the same thing than parler. It is not because you are under the impression that twitter is a democrat tool that people not thinking like you are using the platform to commit crime, promote violence, learn how to be violent and racist

What I mean is originally the hashtag was being used to spread the video. You're right, people took it out of context and started making actual threats. But that's when Twitter removed it all and banned the tag. This seems different from Parler which AWS asserts still hadn't addressed content they had flagged as violations before

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#69

Post by dgellow »

jfengel wrote: post #62
dgellow wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.

The content is hosted on a computer owned by a corporation, not the government. Many people interpret this as their decision to make, rather than the government's. If you don't believe so, you'll have to describe the ways in which their rights to their computers differ from yours.

See my response here, I believe that's also relevant to your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25764333

Re: AWS repeatedly warned Parler about posts urging murder

#70

Post by vel0city »

dgellow wrote: post #31
newacct583 wrote: post #2

Editorialized title. Link is to the response Amazon filed yesterday to Parler's law suit. That said, yeah. I don't know why people are screaming so hard about censorship when the simple truth is that this was an attempt to retroactively apply moderation to a community that had verifiably gotten out of control, at a moment where it was clear that many of these threats were real and not just rhetoric.

So, I'm not arguing one way or another, I just want to try out the following for the sake of discussion as I haven't seen it elsewhere: if we consider Amazon to be an infrastructure provider, and that by doing this they have a duty of neutrality, instead of shutting down Parler directly the approach would be to send a complain to a relevant federal authority (not sure which one that would be, maybe the FBI? please co…

I expect common carriers to have a duty to neutrality and defer to at least some government agency with oversight before deciding to pull the plug.

There is one rail line to carry grain in and out of a community. That rail line is a common carrier. It shouldn't be able to arbitrarily decide whose cargo to carry or not.

There is realistically only one ISP at my home. That should be a common carrier. They shouldn't be able to arbitrarily choose which IP addresses I can connect to or not, or what ports I can choose to talk on. I realistically have no choice on who to choose for that, so there's no market for alternative providers for me.

AWS is not a common carrier. If you get dropped from AWS there's still Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM/Softlayer, Hertzner, Digital Ocean, Linode, Hostgator, Dreamhost, and so many other smaller cloud/VPS providers out there. And that's assuming you're for some reason entirely unable to roll your own hardware and move your app into a colo, of which there are literally hundreds of providers in the US alone. There is lots of competition in the cloud hosting industry, and if you widen it to the hosting industry in general its extremely wide.

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